The Community-College Transfer System Is Broken. Who’s to Blame?

Despite recent declines in college enrollment and decreasing confidence in higher education, a bachelor’s degree remains essential to access well-paying jobs with employment benefits. Unfortunately, low transfer rates from community colleges to universities are a major roadblock. Roughly one-third of American college students attend a community college, doing coursework that should, theoretically, allow them to complete the first two years toward a bachelor’s degree at an affordable price. This is an especially appealing option for low-income students. And yet two-thirds of community-college students do not transfer, even though most aspire to complete a bachelor’s degree.

That this transfer process is flawed is well known, but prior efforts have misdiagnosed the problem. Too often, policymakers, advocates, and scholars interested in improving transfer have focused narrowly on community colleges as the crux of the problem. Countless books and articles fixate on high student-to-adviser ratios, byzantine pathways, multiple missions, and a lack of resources within community colleges.

In response, new policies like Guided Pathways aim to streamline systems within community colleges. Yet, the burden of improving transfer should not fall so squarely on community colleges. By definition, transfer requires planning and coordination across institutions: Students who plan to transfer must satisfy requirements at both their current college and their prospective destinations. In our new book, we draw on six years of longitudinal interview data with students and personnel at community colleges and public universities in Texas. Our research shows that improving transfer requires a major shift in how we understand the problem.

The flawed transfer process is not a community-college problem — it is a public higher-education problem. Rather than blame community-college students or staff, as most previous efforts have done, the actions of individual students and community-college staff are considerably driven — and constrained — by a broader social order, where the “rules of the game” are often set by universities.

Community-college transfer is often thought of as a “two plus two” model, where a student completes two years at a community college and then two years at a university, earning a bachelor’s degree within four years. In reality, this straightforward path is rare. Although two-thirds of states have guaranteed articulation agreements, where associate degrees (worth two years of credits) should be fully transferrable to a public university, one-third of states — including Michigan, Arizona, and Texas, which we study — do not.

These states rely on “bilateral agreements” negotiated between two institutions. A community college in one city might have different bilateral agreements with four or five different public universities, or transfer destinations. Students considering multiple institutions must consider how their community-college courses may “count” differently at each university. These bilateral agreements give institutions greater autonomy; they can be tailored to each institution’s preferences and do not require state approval. Even in states where generalized articulation agreements are present, university departments still have significant discretion to negotiate how credits will apply toward a bachelor’s degree, given the variation in curricula. In either case, the transfer process is highly complex and uncertain, requiring community-college students and staff to consider requirements at multiple institutions, with the risk of accumulating excess credits (and their associated costs).

Bachelor’s-degree completion through the community-college pathway varies widely by state, and one key factor may be a state’s transfer policy. Yet we observed instances where efforts to improve transfer pathways — either at the state or institutional level — were blocked by university actors. When confronted with state policies to increase credit applicability for transfer students, we saw university faculty and leaders use their power to ensure that their courses were prioritized, arguing that university courses are more rigorous and prestigious. In several instances, we saw university personnel resist statewide policy reforms that would streamline transfer for students, voicing concerns for standardization and loss of autonomy over their programs.

We saw a faculty council at a major university unanimously vote to oppose the coordinating board’s expansion of Fields of Study — a policy mandating that approved pre-major coursework apply toward a degree in the same major at any public institution — asserting that it “threatens the authority and responsibility of higher education faculty to design curriculum.” In the resolution, faculty voiced concerns about “unintended consequences related to preparedness, certification, and accreditation.” In other cases, when a transfer student sought to have a prior course apply to their university-degree plan, we heard of faculty or department chairs taking an extremely long time to review courses to determine if that course was equivalent, sometimes “sitting on it for a hundred days, literally,” according to one administrator. Universities may not intend to create barriers for students, but their powerful role in setting the rules and norms for transfer ultimately reproduces racial and economic inequality in access to higher education and degree attainment.

In contrast, we found that community-college personnel have little power. They cannot determine how credits earned at their institutions will transfer. The community-college staff members we spoke with told us there was little they could do within their institutions to drive the broader policy reforms required to improve the transfer process between institutions. For example, we closely observed efforts to create a regional-transfer agreement among institutions, so that community-college students could rely on clear transfer guidelines that articulate how their credits would apply toward all the universities in the area. The community colleges’ administrators excitedly shared that such a coalition “held a lot of promise to build aligned curricula” and reduce credit loss. But then the most selective institution in the area refused to participate, and the coalition fell apart. Community-college advisers pivoted to focusing on what they could control — helping students intending to transfer by sharing information about the varying and fluid university requirements.

In decentralized environments — like those in many of the states without guaranteed articulation agreements, where each university maintains its own standards — the burden is placed on students to curate information from multiple sources. We found that this complexity systematically impedes would-be community-college transfer students. Students described the need to “be strategic” and “proactive” about vetting transfer information and reviewing university websites to determine what was most trustworthy, often in response to receiving misinformation, or conflicting information, from advising staff. If students simply followed the advice of community-college staff, they could be led astray, as it was virtually impossible for staff to keep up with the vast amount of constantly changing transfer information.

Existing reforms are not enough. Guided Pathways, which has now been adopted at over 400 community colleges, recommends research-based structural reforms, including increased advising and implementing curricular changes to help students identify a broad area of interest early in college. It aims to disrupt the status quo, but, as its reforms only occur at the community-college level, it may not improve baccalaureate-degree attainment unless four-year institutions also get on board. Similarly, information and nudge-based interventions, such as improved transfer guides or reminders to students to connect with their advisers, may help, but these are error-prone and still do not address the underlying problems.

Without government intervention, universities will continue with business as usual. This arrangement ultimately undermines the democratic aims of community colleges, and disproportionately affects low-income students and students of color, who are more likely to enter higher education through a community college. To shift the social order, more states could adopt policies that require that an associate degree (comprised of two years of coursework) guarantees admission in the same major to at least one public university. Universities would have to apply the 60 credits toward the bachelor’s degree and count students as having completed their general-education coursework, so that transfer students can enter with junior standing and focus on major-specific courses. But how universities accept and substitute courses is otherwise up to them, maintaining some institutional autonomy. Such policies shift the burden from students to the receiving institution to decide how credits will substitute and avoids excess credits for students. Even in states that have moved forward with guaranteed transfer for associate-degree recipients, like California, accountability is essential. Government actors must follow up with institutions to make sure credits are being transferred and applied as mandated.

Universities must shift from thwarting transfer to aiding transfer. Community colleges and public universities must take shared responsibility to improve college transfer. That change can occur voluntarily or through mandated reforms, but community colleges cannot solve the transfer problem alone.